I gently introduced my wife to Linux & GNOME by giving her
one of my old desktop machines to play with, and within a
few days she was bugging me to put Linux on her laptop for
her.
So as I type this, the RH7.2 installer is cranking away.

And we are now officially a Windows-free household.

Distros

I probably have not installed Red Hat since 4.x, and
I'm amazed at how far things have come. The installer that
comes with 7.2 is really nice. I can't help but
remember the first install I ever did, which was Slackware
(IIRC) back in 1993. Or maybe 1994? Anyway, it was a
long time ago, and it involved a big pile of floppy disks
that I had painstakingly downloaded.

I've been using Debian for the last several years, but I
think RH has won me back. I was a fairly loyal Red Hat user
back in
the day, but then (ironically) Havoc Pennington convinced me
of Debian's overall superiority. Isn't life peculiar?

I built GNOME2 out of CVS for the first time the other
day. I haven't played much with the gnome-core bits (in
particular, the 2.0 panel kept crashing), but I've started
looking at the part I really care about -- the development
environment.

Mostly I've played with glib/gtk+, and the new versions are
so much nicer than the old ones. I've always been
fond of gtk+, but there always were some huge annoyances
that made programming with it much more painful than was
really necessary.
I'm happy to report that the situation is now vastly
improved... the APIs clean-ups are fabulous, and I'm loving
the new tree and text widgets. Everything seems
well-thought-out, which is about the highest compliment I
can think of.

I love GObject. I didn't really realize how badly I
needed interfaces -- now that I have them, I can think of a
dozen places where they can really make a difference in my
code.

I was worried that Pango was going to make things more
complicated, but now I see how it makes everything so
much easier, at least from the developers point-of-view.
The fact that we haven't been able to do things as simple as
mixing bold, italic and 'normal' text is totally idiotic.
Now it is trivial, as it should be.

Now we just need to do something about the signal emission
overhead...

As Evolution finally makes the 1.0 mark, I've been
recovering from the final mad dash with a just-for-fun
weekend hacking project that I dropped into Gnome CVS a few
minutes ago:
GnomeChart
(CVS module 'gnome-chart') is a little app that grabs stock
data
from Yahoo! and displays it chart form using libguppi.
Give it a try! (Warning: I'll probably make another Guppi
release soon, but until then GnomeChart requires guppi3
CVS.)

Well, I finally met a person who believes that the WTC
attack was a conspiracy by the Mossad to create a pretense
for war against Islamic countries. I knew these people
existed, but I hadn't encountered any of them in the flesh
until this weekend.

Interestingly enough, the conspiracy theorist in question
was not a Muslim; he is a young Eastern European
Catholic who has lived in this country for a few years. His
"reasoning" was rather interesting: he asserted that
crashing the planes into the towers was an act of
aeronautical skill that only "a few top pilots in the world"
could accomplish. "Who has those kinds of pilots? The
Mossad!"

I saw no point in getting into an argument with him (who I'm
somewhat acquainted with, and who is otherwise a perfectly
nice and seemingly rational fellow), so I just smiled and
nodded. He comes from a rural area in one of those
countries that may not have liked being overrun by the
Germans, but which enthusastically participated in the
liquidation of their Jews... so I guess I shouldn't be
surprised that he soaked up a certain amount of
Zionist-Bankers-Rule-The-Worldism that may still be sloshing
around in the culture there.

We've got primitive graphing working in gnumeric now. Yes,
we had primitive graphing working in gnumeric a long time
ago, but now for the first time we can also:

Load and save graphs in .gnumeric files.

Import some graphs from XL (or so Jody tells me).

It isn't much, but it is a beginning. There will probably
be a dual Guppi/Gnumeric release within days.

I just noticed that DSL backwards is LSD. Makes you
think, doesn't it...

My DSL went away on Monday, due to bankruptcy of whoevers
wires my data was travelling on. Today my new
DSL came to life, and is three times faster than it was
before. Five days of dial-up was enough for me.

I've been having some problems with my main development
machine, so I'm upgrading to a 2.4 kernel to see if that
will solve some of my problems.
Here is the proof that I'm getting old and
crotchety: I used to enjoy fiddling with system, but now it
just seems like a drain on my time.

Still, I'm eager to see the extent to which SMP performance
is better. And for the first time I've got DRI working; now
all I need are some OpenGL apps...